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Triggerhappy wrote: transport traveling through a relatively asteroid-rick piece of space at extreme speeds ( eg a large percent of light speed )

You mean "captain being a suicidial idiot"
And at large fractions of c you already need a magnetic shielding system to deflect the millions of grains that would kill you very fast if you didnt deflect them with a "passive" system.

You also really like to disregard physics, do you?
Evading rocks at 0.6c? At 200000km/s?
You have literally no time to evade at those speeds, assuming you can detect rocks in an unknown, dark, area at any relevant distance.
The only chance you have at all is to blast that rock to fragments small enough for the shield to deflect.
Because you have fractions of a second to do anything at all.
And a relativistic ship has no mass ratio to spare to be stable enough to move whole ship widths in fractions of a second.
In addition to not having the width to spare to do such jerking. Because the shield takes enough power with small diameter, you cant have wide arms dangling around full of dead mass to do the jerking.

As pointed out, the station would not need to move quickly to dodge - there would be plenty of time ahead of the impact to shift the arms. A light nudge on each arm in the right direction by the center piece will place it soon enough in the right position. And breaking those arms will return almost all the power used to move them in the first place.

That saves us no capacitors and generators.

Triggerhappy wrote:
and still you risk incorrectly offsetting the asteroid

Not really.
When you have hours, days, months time to detect and deflect the asteroid you have time to properly observe the rock, do thorough measurements yadda yadda.
you also have lots of time to do extra adjustments on the rock

Also with that kind of infrastructure its likely that theres at least an earth defense grid.
And at least some other stations with similar equipment.
Making it trivial to hit the rock from a direction that makes it impossible that the rock could go in a direction that leads it into the station anyway.
(Ignoring that that is impossible anyway because of conservation of momentum....)

Triggerhappy wrote:
Precise shot on the rock itself, if you want to off-set it and not crack or burn though it.

You know, even if you break it apart that the fragments still are off-course because of conservation of momentum?

Triggerhappy wrote:
Both will give you size and reflective properties, not exact volume and mass.

And what is volume if not size you genius?
Take a look at the rock, you know its volume.
Take a harder look, you know what its made out of.
You know the volume and rough composition, you know its mass.

"Reflective properties", you mean a reflective spectrogram that can tell you a lot of things, including composition

"Ultimately, a spectrophotometer is able to determine, depending on the control or calibration, what substances are present in a target and exactly how much through calculations of observed wavelengths."

Triggerhappy wrote:
The station IS the crane!

Yes, why move only a couple of tons if you can throw around kilotons instead.
A crane is much more precise because you dont have to juggle as much masy.

Triggerhappy wrote:
A hose of appropriate size would have trouble connecting between two moving arms.

Then how about not spending mass on the heavy mover system and use a stupid plastic tube?

Triggerhappy wrote:
RCS thrusters or gyros for precision? Why? A shift of a few centimeters in the right direction and you are slowly rotating just how you want to.

Because conservation of angular momentum doesnt exist

the thing is far from precise enough to move cargo in a precise way.
Varying mass, varying center of mass, varying displacements, varying rotations for the displacement.
And the rotation and displacement arent independent.
Its a very crappy crane replacement

You have to use a crane anyway to get the stuff over to/from the waiting ships anyway to get rid of the imprecisions and general crappiness of the thing.

Thanks JanB1, I loved the vid from here. The attention to detail, knowledge of what he was creating/ wanting, the repository of pictures for decals .. most likely for an art department, because in each shot was about 10 or so other commands within the software that I couldn't see him do.

Weapon rendering demo
Weapon rendering using photos, a demo I recorded for my students, you check out the descriptions on the video! (Might be abit lengthy though! cause i didnt want to speed it up too much for my students )